Hibbett Sporting Goods'
(
HIBB
) earnings of $0.59 per share for the third quarter ended October
2011 beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $0.51 and surged 34% from
the prior-year quarter on the heels of robust performance of
footwear and apparel sales along with operational efficiencies.
Management has raised its earnings guidance for the current fiscal
year to a range of $2.05 to $2.11 a share.

Management also remains committed to expanding the store
network. Moreover, Hibbett's sharp focus on mid-sized and smaller
markets and strategic mix of branded as well as localized
merchandise provide an edge over its rivals. Also, the company has
a healthy balance sheet with no bank debt.

Our long-term Outperform recommendation on the stock indicates
that it would perform well above the market. Our target price of
$47.00, 22.2x 2011 EPS, reflects this view.

Ingram Micro
(
IM
) is one of the world's largest distributors of IT products. The
company failed to impress with its third quarter 2011 results.
Moreover, the soft retail sector in Europe and the Asia-Pacific, as
well as the ERP transition issue in Australia resulted in an
unexciting 2011 guidance.

Though management appears confident about most of the near-term
issues and the regaining of market share in Australia, we remain
cautious. Also, while the company's strategic partnerships with IT
giants are encouraging, its significant European exposure, high
dependence on IT spending and debt-laden balance sheet are causes
for concern.

Hence, we have downgraded the stock to Underperform from
Neutral. Our target price of $16.00 reflects a P/E multiple of 9.9x
our 2011 EPS estimate, which is at a slight premium to the industry
average.

The collapse of MF Global will have many fascinating story lines
to uncover over the next several months. Here are at least
four...

1) How did regulators like FINRA, which noticed leverage
problems with the firm's $6.3 billion bet on European debt over the
summer, not act sooner and more decisively to prevent the
questionable speculation with other people's money from ending very
badly?

2) Between $600 million and $1.2 billion in funds are missing.
What's more interesting to me than where the money is found, is how
it got illegally moved from customer segregated accounts in the
first place.

Did Jon Corzine call the shots? We may never know if he pleads
the fifth next month and no one else tells the truth.

3) What does this mean for futures exchanges like
CME Group
(
CME
) who up till now have maintained a spotless record of protecting
customer funds involved in trading positions through a rigorous
risk control system using mark-to-market against exchange-monitored
collateral?

It's one thing for an exchange to be vigorous with the trading
risk and collateral it watches every second of the day, and another
to be responsible for constantly auditing the cash balances of tens
of thousands of customer trading accounts not directly under its
control and spread around the world.

4) If we do get more facts on how the former
Goldman Sachs
(
GS
) chief may have gambled away the money and livelihoods of
thousands of people, what will we learn about the decision-making
processes of an apparently upstanding citizen who served New Jersey
for nearly a decade as both a US Senator and its Governor?

I can take a shot at giving you a preview of the answer to
number four because I predicted something like this would happen
(again) in a July 2008 article I wrote for SFO Magazine, "The
Mental Models of Financial Sabotage."

So even before we learned of Bernie Madoff's enormous ponzi
scheme in December 2008, Raj Rajaratnam's insider-trading club in
October 2009, and the hidden $2 billion shank by a
UBS AG
(
UBS
) trader recently, I made a list of the biggest rogue traders and
hedge fund blow-ups and proposed that they would keep on
happening.

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